Unsure of how to vote today on Initiative 300, which would create an official Denver UFO commission? On the fence regarding whether or not the city should bother creating a body “to help ensure the health, safety, and cultural awareness of Denver residents and visitors in relation to potential encounters…
In a way, Las Vegas is like America turned up to 11: Loud, weird and relentlessly excessive, Vegas is kind of like the splatter pattern that resulted when God balled up everything hilarious and awful about these great United States and hurled it at the most barren part of the…
Tomorrow is the Day of the Dead, but the Olinger Crown Hill cemetery in Wheat Ridge celebrated El Día de Los Muertos on Saturday with music, dancing, art, food, chiles and sugar-skull painting for kids (at least while the sugar skulls lasted). And the party was hot — or at…
Advertising agencies work tirelessly to come up with new ways to tell us the same thing over and over again: “Hey, buy our shit. Don’t you want to be happy?” Thankfully though, there are always a few ridiculous ads that cause us to take pause and appreciate the stupidity of…
It used to be that every November, for many years, you could begin to count the days until Chanukah, like clockwork, with the arrival of the Robert E. Loup Jewish Community Center’s Leah Cohen Festival of Jewish Books and Authors. But three years ago, the JCC’s in-house Mizel Center for…
We don’t know how Valerie Gaddis-Arellano, who works for the Sage Group’s Second Home Restaurant in Cherry Creek, finds the time to also be an artist. But she does, and Sage’s Corner Office, where she’s also worked, unveiled this six-panel Warhol-inspired installation, Warhol-Eyesed, that now graces the the sides of…
Denver has some amazing coffee shops and some of the country’s best roasts to boot. Amazingly, people don’t seem to pick up on the connection as often as they should — many shops in town roast their own coffee. It might seem counterintuitive for people that hit up the chains,…
Yes, it’s true. Myspace is, amazingly, still around. The advertising dumpster of a social networking site has got a fresh, new look and some new features to keep the tweens busy in between facebooking and sexting and… I don’t know, does anyone between the ages of thirteen and nineteen do…
More than anything, Halloween is a time to try on a new identity, to be one thing and become something else. But homo sapiens sapiens is not the only species to engage in a game of dress-up of sorts — animals do it all the time, like cats that look…
Dana Cain is the lady with her thumb in a million pies: a local maestra of event-planning who throws several well-attended collectors expos, art shows, parties and chocolate-fests each year. Her latest — and biggest — project is next summer’s Denver County Fair. But Dana is also an avid art…
In an effort to showcase the broad character of Denver’s diverse populace, Westword’s own Ben Dayton is doing random interviews with random Denver residents about random topics, randomly. Today he joined Jen McGriff on a bench while she waited for the westbound 15 bus. What follows is their quick conversation…
Gregory Hayes: Re-Seeing New Works is an elegant and very grown-up solo on display at Rule Gallery (227 Broadway, 303-777-9537, www.rulegallery.com). It showcases the recent efforts by Hayes, an emerging artist who lives in New York, where he’s in grad school. But he also has a Colorado connection, having done…
Butchering a buffalo is bloody, smelly work. It takes strength, it takes time, and it draws flies by the hundreds. The Plains Indians did it as often as they could, following the herds, hunting them, breaking down the animals they killed and taking away the meat, the skin, the bones,…
We were all artists at one point. At least that’s Dr. Brandon Davison-Tracy’s theory: The pediatrician and abstract painter posits that, somewhere along the line, adults start to suppress the joy of creation. We stop doing it — but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t there, or that it wasn’t…
Around 300 art-lovers showed up Saturday at RedLine Gallery for a second anniversary bash on the theme of “This is Where We Live.” Other than fundraising, the event’s purpose was to provide an active interface between artists and the public; to that end, there were interactive installations by Jay Dion,…
Advertising agencies work tirelessly to come up with new ways to tell us the same thing over and over again: “Hey, buy our shit. Don’t you want to be happy?” Thankfully though, there are always a few ridiculous ads that cause us to take pause and appreciate the stupidity of…
Warm smiles and soft lighting, shifting pages covered in words set into rhythmic compositions. Friends drinking and listening together. This was the scene on Saturday evening at The Bad Shadow Affair, a poetry and prose reading series at Lost Lake Lounge. The series is a step in the right direction…
Unoccupied kids are like a persistent noise that you can’t find the source of: The din kind of hovers there just below consciousness, increasing in upward force like an inflating balloon held underwater. Or at least that’s what it’s like for me. In order to not go completely nuts, you…
RedLine in RiNo is so much more than a gallery — it’s a self-proclaimed “urban laboratory,” a resident art studio enclave and purveyor of art programs in the schools. And in all its capacities, it is forever reaching out to the community with strong leanings toward collaboration and education. RedLine…
Leave it to the youth of France to riot over something that has little or nothing to do with them. At least not for another 45 years, and chances are by that point the issue will be moot. After France’s proposed raising of the retirement age from 60 to 62,…
Everybody’s seen those lovely “Meth Will Change That” billboards dreamed up by the Colorado Meth Project, which depict scenarios so vile they’ll surely make you want to drop the dope or at least reach for a Handi Wipe. Now local comedians Adam Cayton-Holland and Greg Baumhauer have applied the concept…
Many people complain that street art detracts from a community and cite it as a main influence in rising crime rates and subsequent vandalism, but what happens when so-called vandalism actually benefits a neighborhood? Is it no longer crime? Could it actually be a good thing? The non-profit organization TED,…
